The EU 'Cookie' Directive came into effect today, asking all EU governments to pass legislation to make users aware of how web browser cookies store and track data about them.
In case you didn't know, cookies are little files that are constantly being sent to and from your computer to the servers that power websites. The conventional wisdom is they're mostly harmless and enable you to use shopping basket tools and remember settings, searches and log-in details.
The Cookie Collective is an open membership group of web developers who want to inform the 'Cookie Crunch' debate with some practical data about the secret life of cookies. We created a small plug-in for Firefox which tracked the number and type of cookies our test group collected while using Amazon.co.uk and other popular websites.
The initial results (above) show a much more complex picture than anyone imagined. An average visit generates hundreds of cookies every minute, and over half of them are set by third-party companies you don't know about or remain on your machine, tracking your activities and sharing that data without your explicit consent. Perhaps most concerning is that your computer transmits over 24 times more data back to the web via cookies than is sent to your machine in the form of helper cookies.
This data set is still growing, and there's a lot more analysis to be done, but making changes to the way cookies work will clearly have massive implications for the advertising industry and internet service providers.
The time and cost of changing the cookie system to comply with the EU desire for 'informed consent' to protect our privacy could wreck the revenue models of ad corporations, e-commerce businesses and related industries. The aim of the Cookie Collective is to throw a little light onto the problem and try to crowdsource better approaches to addressing the EU legislation.
If you'd like to get involved, tweet us @TheCookieCrunch.
Andrew Walker (@Killdozer) is the co-founder of Thin Martian and Tweetminster.
